


she is the all seeing beauty (he is the one eyed beast)

by capaldi



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2015-10-22
Packaged: 2018-04-27 12:53:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5049349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capaldi/pseuds/capaldi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s ridiculous to think that he’s developed a filter. Because that would suggest those cards of hers are actually working, an admission he would rather die than confirm. But what he does realize is that his internal system keeps a separate deck of cards for Clara. One for what to say, one that doesn’t need saying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	she is the all seeing beauty (he is the one eyed beast)

He’s a man of adventure. Adores the experiences, tucks every nook and cranny of the explorative process in his extensive knowledge cabinet. He’s not just a risk taker, that would be too simple an answer for a man like him. He likes the challenge, love to best the impossible, and has an exceptional eye for the most dangerous of pursuits. He chases and runs, fights and protects, lives and well, regenerates.

And sometimes he shares all of this with someone else.

Clara Oswald, he chose. It’s the intrigue that gravitates him to her. She was a puzzle, a wonderful game he was excited to get his hands on. Impossible girl, he names her, and that curious part of him wanted her to stay that way.

But when he learns the truth, when she jumps into his own timeline for him, he uncovers more than just a mystery. He uncovers a girl willing to die for an adventurous old man.

And for the first time, he uncovers something he cannot handle.

So he does what he does best, he runs. Not out of cruelty, but in fearing for her own safety, he leaves her behind.

Twice.

  

 

“Close call,” she breathes, hovering next to him. She helps guide his hand towards the right Tardis switch in his fumbling mess.

They’d barely managed to stumble in without inviting in the terror that was on their tails just a few moments ago. He can’t stop glancing over at her every few seconds, hands still busy with the switches. She’s as energetic as she was when he picked her up two mornings ago (or was it three, he can’t quite remember), a smile on her lips, nothing to indicate the charred state of the rims of her skirt.

“Yeah, close call,” he murmurs. “There’s been a lot of those lately.”

“Sorry?”

He turns to look at her, and maybe that’s the wrong move because what was on the edge of his tongue has immediately started retracting itself. It’s a magical thing, her very existence, so willing and eager to accommodate his stubbornness.

“Nothing,” he replies, and switches on a familiar grin, the one he gives her before every one of their journeys. She knows it too, because she flashes one right back at him.

It’s ridiculous to think that he’s developed a filter. Because that would suggest those cards of hers are actually working, an admission he would rather die than confirm. But what he does realize is that his internal system keeps a separate deck of cards for Clara. One for what to say, one that doesn’t need saying.

And one for the words he hides in his hearts.

 

 

He explains to Clara that he’s still the same man, with a different face. It seems convincing enough because she accepts it with a grin and a hug.

It’s also a complete lie.

Humans rack up a whole closet of regrets towards the end of their life, and as much as he’d like to argue otherwise, Time Lords aren’t really all that different.

With one exception. He gets to have a second chance. And a third, and a fourth, and seeing as he’s on his twelfth by now, he figured he’d better get this one right.

So it hurts when Clara accuses him of trying to preserve a balance. As if nothing has changed, as if exchanging the lives of the few for the lives of many was something he had always set out to do. And what hurts most of all is that she believes it’s a quality to aspire to.

It frustrates him greatly, because he wanted to be this person who put his foot down and said okay, this time around, it’s not just about saving the most people, it’s also about saving the right ones. He wanted to be this person who makes promises and actually keeps them. He wanted her to realize he’s not the same person who’d leave her for a third time.

But he clarifies, he’s no hero either.

  

 

“That was the most fun I’ve had in ages.”

Her eyes are bright but his are less so, busying themselves with the fresh cut marks along her left cheek. Blood, smeared with dust left a streak of dark red spanning down to her neck. It made it hard for him to look at her.

“If I hadn’t shown up,” he doesn’t continue, afraid to even think about what would have happened next.

“But you did show up,” she reminded him. “You always do.”

“No I don’t,” he tells her, in a kind of somber voice he reserves for those serious moments. And Clara knows it too, because she stops smiling. “I try to, but sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I’m too late and I’m starting to think that moment where I’m too late is coming around the corner.”

“What are you saying,” she says it like she’s accusing him of something awful. It’s both demanding and angry and sad and it makes him wonder again how so many emotions can emerge from such a tiny figure.

“I just think,” he pauses, and tries to phrase it carefully in a way that doesn’t invoke her specific brand of fury. “Maybe we should tone down the danger levels a bit. Maybe you should go home and take a shower for once.”

“There’s a shower here,” she points out stubbornly, and part of him regrets enabling that exasperating trait of hers. “And since when have you cared about danger.”

“Look, think about it like taking a vacation from another vacation,” he tries to ameliorate the situation. “You know, go about your life for a bit, and I’ll pick you up in a few weeks.”

“I can’t just go about my life like that. It’s not that simple,” she purses her lips, and does that thing where it makes it impossible for him to read what she’s thinking.

“Sure it is. Just do whatever it is you humans do,” he waves his hand about, because he’s in that nervous state where he’s not sure what she’s going to do next. “You did have a life before me, you know?”

“No, I didn’t. I was just living. There’s a difference.”

“Then go back to just living,” They’ve reached the point where he regrets having started the conversation in the first place, but also can’t bring himself to stop without getting the last word. It’s a terrible habit. “You humans are great at adapting to new environments. There’s centuries of experience ingrained in your genes.”

Clara reaches one hand over to rest on his forearm, and his rambling halts. Or rather, the words stop at his throat.

“Doctor, I can’t,” she pleads softly, and suddenly he becomes ever so aware of her fingers ghosting over the fabric of his sleeves. “I’ve seen too much, you know that. How could I just stop. Who in their right mind could say no to all of _this_.”

“There was one,” he mentions quietly. But as her name brushes against his lips, he’s reminded of how her leaving was entirely his doing. The works of a man who refused to live in the present.

“And did she ever tell you why?”

With others, he sometimes needed a map just to navigate through all the different expressions. But with Clara, he just knows. That look, it’s both curiosity and confusion. And he wants to tell her. Wants to lead her through all of his past stories and explain how he’d let an incredible person like Martha go because he couldn’t give her the very thing he had asked of Clara. He saw Martha as a one eyed man sees the world.

“No, she left that part out,” he lies. Not because he’s accustomed to it, but because it’s easier, which incidentally could also be why he’s accustomed to it.

“Well, I’m sure it was your fault,” she flashes him a faint grin, and he forces out a weak smile.

“It usually is.”

  

 

He changes when he regenerates. But humans, they change as a result of a sequence of small events. Although in this case, he’d hardly categorize himself as a subtle force.

And of course it’s not completely unintentional. He’s yearning to show them his perspective, open their eyes to the vast universe that only he can see, and share with them the excitement and the discovery. It’s not by some generosity of his that he does this, rather it’s much simpler than that.

He’s alone.

And perhaps it’s because of that overeagerness that always imprints some unlikeable aspect of himself onto his companions. Clara, most of all. He can hardly remember the Clara who used to slap him for daring to undervalue human life, the Clara who reminded him that risks are for people who are alone, and not for weaponizing against those around him.

The Clara he sees now jumps into the fray without carrying a sword or a plan, and interprets risks as a justifiable calculation to an end. And even as her smile glows more with every passing day, he sees a part of himself in her, festering.

He wants to shake her and tell her that she needs to stop now, while she’s still smiling.

Because the sadness will come.

  

 

Clara says no a lot. So much that he can decipher her true intent based on how she frames the word. Sometimes it’s the start of a contradiction, other times, it’s a warning.

She may say no to him, but never to the idea of him. If he asks, she obliges. _I need you_ comes in many forms, with varying degrees of urgency, something he never fully discloses, much Clara’s displeasure. He’ll just shrug and claim innocence like he always does, lying about how he’d forgotten that needing a partner for the intergalactic badminton tournament did not fall under “pressing issues”.

But it didn’t matter. Because as much as Clara may protest with words, her eyes and tone betray an excitement. The perpetual thrill she gets from traveling with him.

“Why do you do it. Traveling with people,” she asks once, after they’re stumbling back into the Tardis, more than a bit tipsy and out of breath after attending some alien festival they’ve long forgotten the name of. “I mean I know why you travel, but don’t you ever wonder if it might be easier on your own?”

“Sure, I was curious for about a week,” he explains, fumbling around the controls, not really even knowing where they were heading next. “But what’s the point in having all this,” he makes a sweeping motion with his arms across the Tardis, “without someone to brag to about.”

She laughs, a sound he hears often but never ceases to send a begrudged smile to his own face.

“That is so you,” she says between giggles. “You’re like a kid with a toy he can’t stop showing off.”

“Well it is a rather marvelous toy.”

She punches him jokingly on the shoulder, and nearly loses her balance in her intoxicated state, putting her hand out to catch herself. On reflex, he wraps his arm around her back and effectively reels her into a hug in an effort to steady her. Suddenly he’s made acutely aware of how having two hearts was twice as perplexing in a situation like this.

“I can feel your hearts beating,” she observes, palm pressed against the soft fabric near his chest.

“Well I would certainly hope so,” he quips, hoping to redirect the conversation to anything but this. Once, this kind of close interaction would have made him wholly uncomfortable but now, it was oddly nice. The thought of that generated a different kind of discomfort.

“It’s so...simple,” she drawls. “For an alien who keeps so many secrets close to his chest, it’s surprisingly…”

“Human?”

“I was going to say familiar.”

Then she removes her palm from his chest, and just when he thinks it’s appropriate to finally breathe, she reaches for his own hand and places it over her heart.

“It feels similar, right?”

It surprises him, certainly. Not just the whole motion of it, but the fact that her heart was also beating up a storm.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “It does.”

They’re so close now, just a mere tug of an arm away. He doesn’t dare to make a move, but clearly Clara has other ideas on her mind. She slides his hand from her chest to her cheeks, and stares at him with an expression that’s all too familiar. He’d seen it before. Not in the way she used to look at Danny, but in what seems like lifetimes ago, from another girl. Rose, he recalls.

But his thoughts are interrupted by the situation in front of him. Not just the apparent intimacy, but the contrast of his callousness pressed against the tender skin of her cheeks. Her slow guidance of his hand across her body, the intent reflected within her eyes, and the narrowing gap between their shallow breaths.

“This is an invitation, Doctor,” she whispers.

An invitation to what, he needn’t ask. He may be structurally oblivious to most social cues but what Clara is showing him now was the most basic and obvious of desires. He wants to place both hands on her face and taste the invitation between her lips, hold her body against his so to carve out his resounding yes.

So he does.

He starts by way of slamming her back against the console, but pauses as if goading for a second confirmation. Clara responds by bringing his lips to hers, which he rushes to accept. He wants to slowly relish the moment, but the boyish impatience in him has him inhaling her in a way that makes him fear he’s moving too fast.

But Clara has always been one step ahead.

She sheds her jacket and rips off his, before moving onto his belt buckle. She mutters something about him always making things more difficult as she struggles with the clasp. He swats away her fingers and instead lifts her onto the Tardis console, inciting a squeal of surprise from her.

“Allow me,” he explains, and removes his belt with ease before sliding into her. She lets out a faint whimper as her hands reach to grip the back of his shoulders. He can feel her fingers digging into his skin with every thrust, leaving what were surely crescent marks through the fabric of his shirt.

It feels like a violation, and in some sense, it always has been. For every one of her hesitations, he’s manipulated her into saying yes, whether that’s joining him in his ridiculous ventures, or accepting his perspective of moral quandaries. This was no different.

Except she no longer hesitates. Now she’s the one with the crazy suggestions, quick to embrace his morals as her own, and whispering yes into his ear instead of no.

And as he shudders into her, and feels her collapsing against him a moment later, it invokes a certain emotion in him.

He’s ashamed.

 

  

Once, he tells her the great thing about a time machine. It can go anywhere, to any time, and still return you to the spot you left at.

It’s never been truer than now.

Ever since their last encounter, he’s been running. In fact, he’s not even sure how long he’s been running for. Possibly weeks, or maybe even months. He busies himself with saving villages and occasionally with destroying others. And between the clashes of swords and disregard for authority, he hopes to find the remedy for his shame.

And by the end of his long, long journey, he’s not really sure he’s found it.

But he also misses Clara, and doesn’t hide his eagerness as he sweeps her off her feet upon seeing her. He ignores her surprise and rushes to grab her hand to lead her into the Tardis, missing the fact that it’s only been a day for her.

It descends on him, one day the hollow feeling of travelling without Clara will follow him to his grave.

  

 

His greatest guilt has always been the body count that lies in his wake. He allows death to trail him like a cancer, in the hopes that it won’t follow the people around him.

He thinks he’s doing a swell job of it too until Clara kills a man.

In her defense, he wasn’t a very good man. Between sacrificing children and experimenting on them for his supposed quest for immortality, he was a man worthy of vanquishing.

But when Clara drops the gun and screams, he knows it’s all gone very very wrong. He tries to fix the situation by attempting to calm her, explaining thoroughly how awful and evil of a man he was. But when he tries to move closer, she takes a step back.

“Don’t,” she manages to croak out. She looks at him now like she used to when he first regenerated into this face. Confusion, mixed with a small dose of fear.

It terrifies him, but not nearly as much as the words she utters next.

“Take me home.”

  

 

She tells him she’ll call him when he drops her at her door. _When_ , he had asked, with all the urgency in the world. _When I’m ready,_ she simply replies, and closes the door between them.

He could have ran back into his Tardis and simply travelled forward in time to the moment she called. Waiting was for humans, not Time Lords.

But this time, he didn’t want to cheat. Time was the one thing he could give to her in excess.

So he waits, and waits, and waits. Travelling, but never in time. He scales a few mountains, introduces a variety of inventions to hoards of mystified faces, and learns how to scuba dive, of all things.

When she does call, he drops everything at his feet and leaps into the Tardis.

 

  

When something happens once, it tends to develop into a habit.

When Clara kills her second man, her hands still trembles, but she shakes off his worries, and tells him they’ve got people to save first.

The third time around, her grip is steady, and her eyes firm.

“He was going to hurt innocent people. Us. You.”

She doesn’t realize that more than anyone, she’s the one hurting him the most.

 

  

They talk less, which is sometimes more than welcome when she drags him into the Tardis and slips a hand under his shirt. But it becomes something of an unhealthy cycle when it’s hot on the heels of her destruction of a military warhead.

He doesn’t bring it up either, partly because he wouldn’t know what to say on the matter, and also because he doesn’t want to scare her into taking another break. Now, when he’s more worried about her than ever, he doesn’t want to know the feeling of not having her by his side.

She makes the first move, rather unexpectedly, when they’re imprisoned in a tiny cell on a floating battleship.

“I think I know how you feel.”

“Which part? The claustrophobia or the way these handcuffs are chafing my wrist?”

“It wouldn’t chafe if you stopped struggling. You’re not going to hercules your way out of these cuffs, you know,” she reprimands him, and holds his arms still before he does any further damage. “No, I mean, I think I know how you feel about all...this.”

“Annoyance isn’t exactly an uncommon phenomenon with you.”

“Shut up,” she glares at him and he does. “I was wrong. It’s not the travelling that’s the addiction, it’s the saving isn’t it? Do it once, and you just can’t stop.”

She turns her head towards him, for confirmation he imagines, but he can’t bear to meet her gaze. Something about this whole situation was so very wrong.

“And the next thing you know, you’re doing whatever it takes for that next rush. To save more people, you’re willing to make greater sacrifices.”

“You really should stop now,” he replies, in more than one meaning of the phrase.

“But _you_ won’t,” she points out. “You’ll keep going. Keep saving people.”

“I lose people too,” he reminds her.

“And that’s why you can’t stop.”

It’s a bit disconcerting, that her rationale is lining up eerily well with his. Sure, his ego is having a blast but there’s an ache making its way toward his hearts.

“You sound like a teacher,” he says, scowling as he does whenever he brings up her profession. “Like you’re about to lecture me on the solution to this problem. Well come on then, have a go at it..”

She laughs, which only serves to deepen his scowl. “I just do what you do.”

“And what’s that?”

“I run.”

She flashes him her hands, now free of the shackles once encircling them. He stares at her with miraculous wonder.

“How did you -- “

“I learned from the best.”

 

 

They redefine their relationship many times. Sometimes she reaches for his hand in the face of impending danger, and other times she locks him out of his own Tardis as a time-out mechanism.

But they’re always running, and the best part is, neither has to do it alone.

 

  

Meeting Clara was a mystery wrapped up in an even greater one. Understanding her was something else entirely.

And her leaving him was the world on fire.

It was his carelessness catching up with him. It was the transformation of her day by day, growing more and more like him until he forgets that she’s not a Time Lord, but a human girl.

And time and time again, the human race shows a compassion unlike any other, a bout of courage that fails to betrays their own mortality.

Clara throws herself in the line of fire to save someone.

Or so he’s told, because never actually sees it. He only hears a zap and then a scream. That’s right, Rigsy was screaming, crouching where Clara once stood and turning to him for help.

He can’t quite recall his immediate response. He imagines it must have been some unsightly mixture of shock and mortification.

But he remembers the fire, the wreckage, the fear on peoples’ faces as he waved around the sonic like a true madman, eliminating the threat but also causing destruction in his wake. Rigsy is yelling something at him again, but he doesn’t stop to hear it. Clara Oswald is gone and his world is on fire.

And all he wants is to let it burn.

  

 

It occurs to him later in the Tardis that he never got to say goodbye.

Everyone before Clara, he knew. Right before they left, there was always a warning, however brief, there was always a moment of preparation.

But with Clara, there wasn’t anything. His head was turned and she was gone.

In a single instant, his world had been ripped from under him

And in all the time they had, in all the time he’d wasted, he never told her the three words that mattered most.

  

 

He spends a large portion of his time sleeping. Because sometimes, if he’s very lucky, she comes to him. He’d get to feel her skin under his, hear the hum of her voice and see the stretch of her smile. He’d get to say all the words he wanted, spilling everything this time, and bid her a proper goodbye.

Ands when he wakes, he sometimes begs for death.

He sees a therapist. A few handful actually. From different countries in different planets. They all tell him different things, but only mere variations of grieving techniques.

There’s none he likes of course, becoming especially disgruntled with how often “crying it out” comes up as a coping mechanism. Because there isn’t a funeral. This isn’t a tragedy. Clara Oswald is gone and he’s not trying to find the least emotionally damaging way to mourn.

He’s just trying to find a way to breathe.

  

 

He meets a girl, who tells him a story of how she lost her grandmother. She tells him that all the crying in the world never helped, despite what the adults said. But she found something better, painting. Telling her stories through colors on a canvas.

“It’s breathtaking,” she tells him. “When I grip a brush, it’s enough to make me forget about all things I miss most.”

She takes a pause from her work to look at him.

“Is there something like that for you?

When he thinks about Clara, he also thinks about all the places they’ve gone, and all the places they were planning to go. Clara was gone, but those places, they aren’t going anywhere.

“A hundred and one places to see,” he mutters.

“Sorry, what was that?”

“Nothing. I mean yeah, there’s something like that for me too,” he cracks a smile, the first genuine one in a long time.

He gets into his Tardis and starts making a list, thinking about all the times she’d whispered to him about the places she wanted to go, the things she wanted to see.

He never stops running.

  

**Author's Note:**

> okay so in no way is this my prediction of how clara leaves the series (i have a whole separate theory for that which is too difficult to put into words i realize). this is just a thing that sort of happened when i was terribly bored.


End file.
